Arthur Marshall

Can't say I noticed much difference from BW days, apart from a tightening up of overstaying rules and less maintenance due to budget cuts. It's just a managed decline.

I d contact RCR, tell them about the wrong diagnosis and see if they'll reimburse you. Won't hurt to ask.

Which is exactly what has now happened. It was obvious I'd hogged one of the few straight bits so I moved up so someone else could get in. They did, moored, opened the doors, went and sat in the boat leaving a very smelly engine running and blowing straight into mine. Of course, it's noon, they are perfectly entitled to run it till 8 if they want and I have no cause to complain. I've moved. And that's why people leave big gaps - it's not just the leavers who don't consider others.

I never moor near anyone's stern if I can avoid it. I'm sick of the inconsiderate buggers starting their engine without warning and flooding me with fumes. I leave the biggest gap I can, keep an eye out for anyone trying to moor who can't get in and move up happily. Currently at Sutton, with a gap big enough for a seventy footer on each side, and as far away from the bloke running his engine as possible while avoiding overhanging trees. I presume the fact thst your exhaust while mooring up probably made his boat unbearable for an hour or two didn't worry you? Unless of course it's one of the vertical ones, in which case it wouldn't have affected him.

Assuming the person monitoring is awake and not some poor untrained sod on a minimum wage doing his third job of the day. If you want an example of how well remote monitoring works, take your life in your hands and try driving down one of them new smart motorways.

Isn't it that the plants weren't the initial problem, the water hitting the side wall was the problem. That caused excessive turbulence in that particular area, and then add in the fact that the plants had weakened the structure enough to allow the water to batter it's way through, though they may of course have added to the turbulence too. For the rest of the spill, the water might have been belted down at unprecedented rates, but it didn't have the turbulence or drilling effect of the side wall area. Whatever the cause, I'd lay odds that we'll never hear the results of any investigation - it'll be kept secret "for commercial reasons" or simply to avoid frightening the natives.

Same here. I'm now at an age when I simply can't safely get down into the bilge round the engine and expect to get out again without a fair bit of long term pain. And my original engineer is older than me... That being said, the parts I really worry about are things like the starter, alternator, flexible coupling and gearbox, all of which are covered. I don't think my current oil leak will be covered at all as it's probably wear and tear anyway, or possibly the result of a botched previous repair, but then I haven't actually broken down and can get to a yard under my own steam. If i couldn't, they'd tow me. If I'm anywhere near either of my longterm engineers, I'd rather call them out myself and pay them for the job because I know what they can do, but if I'm not, having the insurance of RCR is reassuring. The guys they use are variable in quality, that's all.

To me it seemed that he hadn't been briefed at all. He had no explanation whatsoever for the failure and appeared to have very little idea about anything. While the questioning was pretty pathetic too, you would have thought he could have given some impression that he knew anything at all about canals. He just looked and sounded nervous - not a reassuring look.

I've probably had half a dozen callouts with RCR over the past seven or eight years. A failed started motor was replaced quickly although the bloke had to phone someone up to check how to wire it. A gearbox problem led to the engineer they sent saying he knew nothing about Listers, refusing to read the manual and walking away, leaving me stranded. Another made a valiant effort to fix a broken fuel pipe, failed and again left me stranded - as it turned out because he'd simply used the wrong washers. Two absolutely excellent guys sent on two other breakdowns, both Lister experts (which I always ask for) and both got me going in about half an hour. A gearbox failure led to advice for me to limp home if I could rather than get a tow as that would save me money in the long run - RCR contributed £1000 twice to gearbox repairs, even though it cost me nearly as much to repair the damage that one of the engineers did to the rest of the transmission when he replaced the mended box. The last pair who did an engine service this year for me (never again) did a reasonable job but managed to insult the mooring owner while messing up his yard, for which I asked for an apology which has not been received. So all in all, a mixed bag. I stay with them for the security of knowing I can get an engineer out if needed, with a bit of luck one who knows what he's doing. If i break down completely, they'll get me to a yard and if in their schedule contribute to some of the costs. I think they do their best, a lot depends on the pot luck of who is available to be sent out. Generally, their blokes aren't knowledgeable about old engines - I gather they don't pay well, so most are young and fairly inexperienced. Once they know what they're doing, they tend to leave and go self employed.

I rang them early last week to warn them of an impending claim and they said they had been flooded with breakdown calls because of the heatwave, and there could be a two or three day delay in getting an engjneer to a breakdown.

Entrusting it to a private company would be worse. Their only responsibility is to their shareholders. Anyway, it would probably go to someone like Capita...

The design wasn't fllawed - it was fine when it was designed. Without being a po-faced self-righteous plonker, no one then expected us to trash the planet, or could even imagine that it could be done. However, politicians and professional designers (and inspectors) of weather dependent stuff have known about it for years, taken their salaries and lied. Too late to do much about it now.

Trouble is, you can delete as much as you want but if anyone else has quoted you, it's there for ever. And in the various bits of the web that index old sites and info. The thing that has changed because of all this is a trade-off of data and free use against privacy. Nothing really ever comes free, it just gets paid for in ways you don't see. Even as I write, Mr D Hutch is preparing to flood my inbox with trombone-related porn... You know it's true, however much he will deny it...

If the inspection was anything like the building regs inspection recently done on my house, I'm not surprised the dam failed. It consisted of a bloke from a private company with a clipboard spending two minutes in the garden looking at the work and signing it off . No doubt he was a fully qualified whatever, but his job was basically to ensure the builders got paid without any hassle, whatever the quality of their work (which has turned out to be shoddy in the extreme). The underlying assumption the dam inspector would have been working on (and the pressure from his superiors ) would have been to make sure this inspection wouldn't cost crt any money, or they'd find another company to do the inspection next time (I'm assuming there's more than one company doing this). Their priority is to keep the money coming in, not the safety of a town or two.

It's a shame that none of these so-called climate experts, with their expensive education and endless degrees, have ever mentioned over the last couple of years that we can expect much greater weather events and variation, or that we can expect hotter, wetter and stormier weather. I mean, if they had, someone would have done something, wouldn't they? Nope, it was, as you say, completely unexpected and unpredictable.

My original ISP went bust twenty years ago, the buyers threatening everyone that unless they paid up with big increases everything would be deleted. My old website is still there, glowering away across the years...

Flights open again now.

Thanks - I couldn't get the whole gist watching on a phone, I missed it on the tv.

I believe someone told me that there were three reservoirs built to feed the Macclesfield canal, two of which no longer actually feed it as the connecting infrastructure has been left to rot and no longer exists. God alone knows what state they are in, wherever they are. I gathered from Parrys waffle that the dams are inspected at ten year intervals (can that be really what he said?), not by CRT but by an associated company, presumably to save costs. And obviously shift any responsibility away from crt itself. And then every couple of days a bloke looks at it to see if it's still there, nods and goes away again. And he said this was rigorous? I suppose it worked OK until yesterday. Parry did rather come over as someone who knew absolutely nothing about what he did for a living, which was a little disappointing. I do wonder what they asked him at his job interview.

Look, this is an internet forum, and the introduction of common sense is ridiculous. You are of course right, and the plight of those affected by the current problem rather puts my whinging into the shade. Although it does of course mean I probably can't get the boat to Bollington for fixing, but I'm not risking my home or my life. The engine problems were the final straw on a particularly grotty cruise and probably did colour my whole outlook. Maybe next year wll be better. I've appreciated all the points made, by those who agreed and those who didn't. I shall now cease to chunter.

It wasn't really a golden age - in a lot of ways that was probably about fifteen years back, after most of the reconstruction had been done, it all more or less still worked and BW or whoever it as back then had enough staff on the ground to maintain it. Once all the workboats had been flogged off and everything had to be done by private contractors (or now volunteers), the rot set in - it was obviously to the former's advantage for whatever they did to be shoddy enough so they had to do it again in a year or so, or they'd be out of a job. As Neil says above, there were the feral kids - a friend of mine went through Manchester thirty years ago with a shotgun on the roof of his boat. You don't get that now, not on a regular basis anyway. But I think they got sorted out by playstations and suchlike, rather than becoming more civilised. It's the noise that gets to me mostly, possibly as a musician (I know I have played accordions in the past, but I never do it in public now) it annoys me more than it would most people, and the rapid collapsing of the system. See the local news for the latest instalment...As the government money gets less, the latter won't improve - large swathes of it came from the EU anyway and I can't see us being a priority post any form of Brexit. I have no regrets, and for anyone who has just discovered it, revel in it while it's there. Life on the water is wonderful and I've loved every minute of it... until this year!

"we have taken the decision to close the Marple flight on the Peak Forest canal and the Bosley flight on the Macclesfield canal whilst we manage the potential risks. " https%3A//canalrivertrust.org.uk/notices/15840-marple-flight-peak-forest-canal-and-bosley-flight-macclesfield-canal

Ah yes, just like Carrillion was subject to all sorts of regulations, inspections, audits by all sorts of experts These too were not optional.. Trouble is, every single person involved in any of the part of such a regime is only interesting on one thing, which is keeping their job until they can find another one by telling their immediate boss exactly what they want to hear... .

So over the past few years there's been a major breach on the T&M that flooded Northwich, another on the Middlewich link that took a year or two to repair, Marple locks out of action for a year or so and now Whaley Bridge, New Mills and Stockport are in danger of flooding because the dam is collapsing, the reservoir being emptied and presumably the Peak Forest and the Upper Macc running out of water. I think those of us who have grumbled for years about lack of maintenance and inspections are entitled to the odd "I told you so" moment. Not that it's anything but bloody depressing. Or does any good. The trouble with "management", in almost every industry these days, is that those supposed to be managing neither know how to manage, now much about what they are supposed to be managing (apart from their expenses, pension funds and ability to move on to another job about which they know nothing). ETA PS, it doesn't matter anyway. it's not happening in London.